At the Getty Center, Los Angeles’ world-famous “treasure box on the hill” bearing the name of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, a monumental shift is underway. I chatted with Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame, whose art is at the center of it all. “Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre...
A powerful indictment of the American legal system, “Redaction,” a collaboration between poet Reginald Dwayne Betts and visual artist Titus Kaphar, began its life as a 2019 exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York. As a follow-up to the show, the artists, who are both...
How do we tell our stories? Martine Syms is rewriting the terms. In addition to sculptures, installations and text-based projects, the polymath Angeleno artist has made a string of ambitious films. Her work in FAV extends as far back as her solo show at MoMA in 2017,...
Art sector efforts to decarbonize have been highly visible over the past three years as galleries and artists have publicly pledged concerted action to reduce exhibition-related emissions: Nonprofit advocacy groups like Gallery Climate Coalition, Art + Climate Action...
In an age when so much gratuitous violence pervades our screens, the three-channel film Malka Germania presents a gentle Jungian perspective on the effects of the Holocaust on today’s German citizens. The film alludes to collective trauma about war and subjugation,...
“Children know something that most people have forgotten.” —Keith Haring’s journal entry from July 7, 1986. In the spirit of Keith Haring’s retrospective, “Art Is For Everybody,” I decided to seek a child’s perspective on his work, enlisting my friend’s eight-year-old...
If you are addressing power dynamics in your art, a good place to set scenarios in is a military context. There is a built-in component of control in every aspect of martial discipline. What one wears, eats and how one’s time is spent, is all carefully prescribed from...
The 2022–23 term has been a disaster for the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. disgraced himself by spurning demands from Congress and the public that the Court adopt a code of ethics similar to the one covering all other federal jurists. If such...
Memory is a funny thing. Do you remember skinning your knee when you were a kid, or do you just look down at the scar and think of the stories you’ve heard? As you drive down the first street you lived on, do you remember the market on the corner where you would get...
A stone sculptor and stained-glass artist (among many other things), Fin Simonetti approaches demanding classical mediums with cultural critique and tender ambiguity. The New York–based Canadian artist has become known for her stone carvings of canine body parts—such...
Melrose Hill or Bust We now have critical culture-mass in the area of Western Avenue between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard: half a dozen galleries have settled in, to be joined by LAXART any time now (the latter was supposed to have opened last year). This area...
Dear Babs, I’m a mid-career painter who’s carved out a decent professional career. I’m not famous, and frankly, I don’t want to be. My problem is that I have a unique name I thought would never be confused with another artist. Recently another, young painter with my...
Cowsong Guide me into the depths, where the lack of oxygen intercepts the thing no human accepts. Yet here I am, alive: a joke the wind might contrive. Underneath the beat of your blood, feet in the stars, face in the mud. I can hear your brains beat and your heart...
Ken Taylor Reynaga’s exhibition, “A Mano,” features a wide array of paintings and ceramics that speak to the personal and shared experience of cultural duality, and interrogate the belief that being multicultural places one in an identity limbo. Using his own...
In these bright, gestural paintings, Laura Larraz explores ranging depictions of femininity, from notions of purity and domesticity to the idea of witches. At first glance, her paintings have a clear sense of humor; in Beware of Holy Whore, two pink cherubs hover over...
“Lush” and “riveting” are words that best describe Haitian artist Myrlande Constant’s exhibition “The Work of Radiance” at The Fowler Museum. Constant creates astonishingly beautiful mosaics out of fabric and beads, leaning on skills she developed as a young girl...
After three years of experiencing artwork, exhibitions, podcasts, and news reports related to Covid-19, it seemed there could be nothing left to consume that is new, inspiring or even interesting. Enter Susan Chen. In a surprisingly refreshing and engaging solo show,...
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